hug later, Dana was finally alone.
With a baby.
She zipped to her bedroom, rummaging through her bottom drawer for a pair of old shorts, and a faded UNM T-shirt, changing into both at warp speed. The gurgling, drooling six-month-old pushed himself up on his elbows when she walked back to the living room; Dana squatted down in front of the playpen as if inspecting a new life form. Yesterday, she had no idea this child even existed. Now she was responsible for him, maybe for a few days, maybe for the rest of her life.
The thought slammed into her so hard she nearly toppled over. One day, she figured she’d adopt a child or two, when she was ready, both financially and emotionally. At the moment, she was neither. She’d always assumed she’d have some prep time for accepting a child into her life. As, you know, part of a couple?
So much for that idea.
A particularly ripe odor wafted to her nostrils. A byproduct of the earlier grunting, no doubt.
“Let me guess. You messed your pants.”
Ethan grinned and cooed at her, lifting his head at exactly the right angle for Dana to get a good gander at his eyes. Lake-blue, flecked with gold around the pupils, exactly like you-know-whose. On a sigh, she stood and hefted the smelly little dear out of his cage and over to the sofa, where she changed his diaper with surprising aplomb and less than a dozen wipies.
“Now I bet you’re hungry, right?”
In answer, Ethan stuck his fist in his mouth and started gnawing on it with the enthusiasm of a lion ripping into fresh wildebeest. Dana picked up the much sweeter smelling child and plopped him back into his car seat, which she figured was as safe a place as any to try to shovel food down his gullet. But what food, she wondered, might that be?
“Next time you dump a kid on me, Trish,” she muttered, ransacking the paper bag full of little clanking jars Mercy had helped her pick out at Albertson’s on their way home, “don’t forget the dag-nabbed feeding instructions!”
She yanked out ajar, holding it up to the baby hunk with the killer eyes. “Carrots?”
Ethan gurgled, then let out a loud “Bababababababa” while waving his arms. Then he chortled. Not giggled. Chortled.
Dana sort of chortled back, popping open the jar. “Carrots it is, then.”
Except carrots, it wasn’t. It was like trying to shove a video into a malfunctioning VCR—it slid right back out.
She opened another jar, held it up. “Peaches?”
That got a slightly more forceful rejection.
“O-kaaay … maybe orange stuff isn’t your thing. How about green?”
Green beans went in … and green beans oozed out, accompanied by the quintessential “Get real, lady,” expression.
Dana quickly discovered that baby food didn’t exactly come in a wealth of colors. Or tastes. But she gamely tried creamed corn, chicken (that, she couldn’t get past the baby’s lips), squash, pears and beets.
Pears and beets went down. And down and down and down, until Dana wondered if babies, like puppies, would simply stuff themselves until they got so full they threw—
“Oh, gross!”
—up.
At least four times more food came back out as had gone in. Krakatoa had nothing on this kid, she mused while frantically trying to catch the maroon-and-pear colored mess that kept spewing forth from those little rosebud lips.
Three saturated napkins later, Ethan chortled again. Not seeing the humor this time, Dana did not. And she was hot and getting hungry herself. Not only that, but it was beginning to sink in with alarming speed that no one was going to come take this vomiting bundle of joy away in an hour or two. And what if he didn’t sleep through the night?
With a little groan, Dana let her head clunk onto the tabletop, not realizing how close she was to a pair of enterprising little hands.
“Ye-ouch!” Her own hands flew to her head, prying five tiny and amazingly strong fingers from her hair, which was now liberally infused with regurgitated Gerber 1st Foods. Well, hell. Somebody, somewhere, probably paid big bucks for this look. She got it for free.
Rubbing her scalp—man, the kid had a grip—she regarded her little charge, now in deep conversation with the Tiffany-style lamp over the table. She skootched over, out of Clutcher’s way, and laid her head down again.
So many questions and thoughts swarmed in her brain, she couldn’t sort them out, let alone act on any of them. For tonight, her top priority was keeping the child alive. She was off all day tomorrow, and Ethan had to sleep sometime, right?
Dana lifted her head far enough to prop it in her palm, reaching out to the baby with her other hand. Ethan grabbed Dana’s fingers and tried to stuff them into his mouth. The two little teeth on the bottom made their presence known really fast, but she felt ridges on top, too.
“You getting yourself some new teeth, big guy?” she said with a tired smile.
Ethan chortled.
Dana’s heart did a slow, careful turn in her chest. She stood and scooped the baby out of his car seat, cuddling him on her lap. Ethan settled right in, tucking his head underneath Dana’s chin, and her heart flopped again, more quickly.
This was all too unpredictable for her taste. Her cousin might change her mind, C. J. might want … actually, God knew what C.J. might want.
She cursed under her breath, noting that more no-nos had slipped past her lips in the past several hours than in the entire thirty-two years that had preceded them. Insecurities and turmoil and all the unanswerables swirled and knotted together into a nebulous anger no less fierce for its vagueness. Her eyes stung as she realized how furious she was, at Trish, at C.J. (yes, even though he probably didn’t know about the baby), at fate.
At herself.
All her life, she realized tiredly, she’d let people push her around. All her life, she’d been the one voted most likely to say “sure” when she really wanted to say “I don’t have time” or “I’m not comfortable with that idea” or even, simply, “I don’t want to.” Suddenly, she was a kid again, hearing her mother’s gushing to some neighbor or teacher or saleslady who’d admired Dana’s impeccable manners. “Oh, Dana’s never given us a single moment’s worry,” she’d say. “Always does what she’s supposed to do, never gives us any lip. Just a perfect little angel!”
“Just ask Dana—she won’t mind …”
“You can always count on Dana for a job well done and a smile to go with it …”
“You know, I’ve never heard Dana complain, not even once….”
“Dana won’t be a problem. She’d go along with whatever we decide to do. Won’t you, Dana?”
She pushed herself off the sofa, hugging Ethan, realizing there was nowhere to go. So she stood in place, jiggling the baby, fuming
